THORNTON —The man suspected of kidnapping and killing his estranged wife and her mother in Weld County on Thursday had been sleeping on a couch in a friend’s Thornton apartment for two weeks, the friend said Saturday.

Frederick police had been looking for Cimmeron Johns, 37, on a domestic abuse warrant since Jan. 28 without success.

That began what police say was a bloody sequence of events that ended early Saturday when a body believed to be Johns’ was found in the Viewpoint Condominiums after a standoff in which he exchanged gunfire with police.

A friend of Johns’ for six years, O’Donnell told The Denver Post that he had returned to her apartment Thursday night and admitted he shot and killed his wife and her mother.

O’Donnell then accompanied him late Thursday and early Friday when he attempted to clean up after the alleged slayings.

Asked why she did not call the police, O’Donnell cried and said she did not exactly know.

Weld County Bureau Chief Steve Reams confirmed that an abandoned Mercedes found at the crime scene was immediately linked to 41-year-old O’Donnell as the owner of the vehicle.

Investigators now believe that Johns used the Mercedes to force an SUV belonging to his mother-in-law Sherri Pachello, 56, and carrying his wife Alicia Johns, 36, off the road in a rural area of southern Weld County. He commandeered Pachello’s 1991 Ford Explorer and left the two women’s bodies behind, in separate locations about a mile apart, police say.

The bodies were discovered midday Friday.

Reams said O’Donnell was taken into custody around 5 p.m. Friday during the Weld County Sheriff’s Office’s investigation as a person who potentially had infor-mation. O’Donnell eventually gave police Johns’ location.

Frederick Police Chief Gary Barbour said police began hunting for Johns on Jan. 24 — the day Alisha Johns checked in to Salud Family Health Center with severe injuries on her face after being beaten off and on for two days.

Johns knew the police were searching for him.

“We contacted him that very day of the assault and said, ‘Hey Cimmeron, where are you? We need to talk,’ because we couldn’t find him,” Barbour said.

By then, Alisha Johns had told police that her husband beat her because he believed she was having an affair.

Rosann O’Donnell said that during the weeks Johns found refuge on her couch at 10211 Ura Lane, he never showered and was out of work. He often talked about killing himself, but not about killing others, O’Donnell said.

“Me and him were both going through so much, just trying to be there for each other,” said O’Donnell, who added that her own abusive fiancé was extradited to Mexico in December.

O’Donnell said the two remained platonic throughout their friendship and his stay at her home.

At 10 that night, Reams said, Pachello called her husband saying she was being chased by someone driving a dark-colored car. She had just picked up her daughter at the Johnses’ home in Frederick. Reams said the Mercedes was linked to O’Donnell “basically the minute we found it at 11 o’clock at night.”

Thornton police knocked on her door shortly after 11 p.m. Thursday, around midnight on Friday and multiple other times, Reams said.

O’Donnell wasn’t there. She had left with Johns — in Pachello’s Ford Explorer.

Johns returned to her doorstep sometime after 10 p.m., O’Donnell said. She said she didn’t notice the specks of blood on his clothes until Johns started rattling off what he’d done.

“He said ‘I did it, Rosann, I killed her,’ ” O’Donnell said. ” ‘We have to get your car; she (Pachello) ran me off the road into a ditch.’ “

He talked in circles and at an accelerated speed, she said.

“He said ‘We gotta go, we’ve gotta go now,’ ” O’Donnell said.

Shocked, O’Donnell went with him.

She followed him to Pachello’s SUV. Inside, she said, the car was dripping with blood.

Johns drove them to what O’Donnell called “the middle of nowhere” — southern Weld County — and quickly discovered they could not push her Mercedes out of the ditch.

They took the bloodied Explorer to Walmart to buy a tow chain, but left with only plastic and tape to cover the SUV’s window, which Johns told O’Donnell had been shot out earlier in the night.

During the drive, he told her he had dropped the women’s bodies at two different locations.

O’Donnell urged her friend to return to the bodies.

“I said ‘You can’t just leave her like that,’ ” O’Donnell said, not specifying who she was referring to. “He said ‘I don’t have a choice.’ “

Johns drove them to a motel in Thornton where he took a shower and fell asleep. O’Donnell said she did not go into the motel.

“I was waiting in the car for three hours,” she said.

The sun was peeking over the horizon Friday morning when Johns and O’Donnell decided to take Pachello’s SUV back to her apartment.

“We stopped at McDonald’s, came home and slept for a while,” O’Donnell said.

The two fell asleep at about 6:30 a.m. in O’Donnell’s apartment, she said, where her 24-year-old son was already sleeping.

O’Donnell said that Johns had moved to the unit of an “acquaintance” on the third floor, one above her, by the time police again checked the condos at 10 a.m.

It wasn’t until late afternoon, though, after the women’s bodies were discovered, that police and O’Donnell made contact. Weld County deputies identified Pachello’s SUV at about 4:15 p.m. near the condos, Reams said, and conducted yet another search — this time a success.

O’Donnell said the first story she told police was a lie.

It was Johns’ idea, O’Donnell said, that if she should ever be approached by police to tell them he had taken her and her children hostage.

“He didn’t want us to get in trouble,” O’Donnell said. “The cops were like ‘We’re not buying it.’ “

As she was being transported to Weld County Southwest Service Complex on Friday evening for questioning, O’Donnell said, she recalled her friend’s agony and suicide threats in the last two weeks — and gave police his location upstairs.

O’Donnell met the realization of her friend’s death and his alleged final deeds in life with raging tears on Saturday. In the sunny afternoon, she sat in a dark trailer on the oversized couch of another friend, Candy Myers, nervously flicking a pink lighter.

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